According to Netflix’s first-party viewing data, most WWE premium live events had higher viewership so far in 2026 versus the prior year. That includes increases for WrestleMania by 13% and 7% across the two nights.
The degree to which we should account for any VPN viewership that may be happening in the U.S. is anyone’s guess. Since September 2025 in the U.S., WWE PLEs moved from Peacock to the ESPN Unlimited app. Availability of the PLEs on ESPN costs $29.99 per month if you don’t already get access to the app as part of your pay TV service, which is a significant price increase versus Peacock’s price points, enough to motivate many to use VPN services to mask their IP address and watch the PLEs on Netflix, where those events are streamed in most regions outside the U.S.
If VPN viewing is having a significant distortive effect on how the PLEs are measured, I would expect to see lesser positive differences in future year-over-year comparisons against events that happened in September 2025 and after. We should see data on those early next year.
This data was made available as part of Netflix’s every-six-months “What We Watched” report. Note that the viewing data indicated in grey represents later viewing measured for the given event that happened in later six-month periods.
For the second year in a row, the single day of Royal Rumble was again more highly viewed than either individual day of WrestleMania. It’s somewhat surprising given Royal Rumble is thought of as WWE’s second-biggest event of the year after WrestleMania.
A comparison of viewing on Smackdown is more encouraging as a measure of WWE’s popularity on the platform and suggests that VPN use isn’t having an especially strong effect on this data.
Across the first six months of 2026, Smackdown’s global views are up nearly every week compared to the same week in the prior year. There are plausible hedges here, too. This measurement could be helped by WWE content including Smackdown launching in new regions sometime after the initial January 2025 premiere. India and France are at least two of those regions.
Reflecting that, Smackdown’s average in the first quarter of the year was up from the prior year: averaging 1 million in Q1 this year, versus 800,000 last year. But the average for Q2 was flat: 900,000 in both 2026 and 2025. The values here are rounded to the nearest 100,000 because the data Netflix provides publicly is no more granular.
For Raw, Q1 was down in 2026, though that is highly skewed by the debut episode in January 2025. But Q2 was down also, from 3.0 million in 2025 to 2.8 million in 2026.
Note: This part of the report has been corrected. The report initially, incorrectly, showed that Q2 was slightly up in 2026.
NXT appears to be completely flat across time, averaging 200,000 in the first two quarters of this and last year. But Netflix’s data, rounded to the nearest 100,000, makes it difficult to understand changes in viewership over time for programs with smaller audiences like NXT.
Although it’s not unusual for unscripted or reality-style programming to decline in Season 2, WWE Unreal’s second season was down 43% from Season 1. That’s a percentage difference measured after each season had about the same amount of time to gather viewing. In this case, we’re comparing viewing data for Season 2 after 161 days from its release: 2.8 million global views. Season 1 measured at 4.9 million global views when measured 155 days after its release date.
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